Strange relatives: Mutualities and dependencies between aborigines and pastoralists in the northern Kimberley

In the northern Kimberley (WA) Aborigines and Europeans living and working on pastoral leases have improvised means of staving off, incorporating and generally managing the other's demands on their psychophysical resources. Local racial politics configure a hierarchised social field around a few central figures: founding European lease-holders and their male children by non-local, mixed-descent Aboriginal women, mixed descent head-stock-men born of a European leaseholder and a local Aboriginal woman, and then local Ngarinyin people who constitute most of the work-force. In this paper, I analyse the intercultural dynamics of this social field employing R.D. Laing's notion of the 'family phantasy'. The subject-matter also entails theoretical reconsideration of questions concerning the relative openness or otherwise of Indigenous Australian socio-cultural categories.